I am replacing the showModalDialog function which no longer works in Chrome and FF. We have many applications using that. The problem is, pop up windows do post instructions to the web server and update the database. For instance if there's a list of accounts on screen and edit is clicked on one of the accounts, an edit page appears as a pop up, posts changes back to the web server, then the list is refreshed with changes. The entire list may be refreshed or just text that changed.
I made a javascript function to do pop up content using overlays. I thought it would be simple to replace showModalDialog calls with the javascript function, but I did not consider post instructions sent by the pop up page to update the database, and complexity to facilitate that. Posting can be done via ajax-like functionality, encapsulated in a set of functions. Before I start writing code to do this I'd like to know what other people have done in this circumstance. Thanks
I wrote some javascript to do everything I want. Since my pop up windows had javascript, I needed to run javascript upon rendering modal content, and also when the modal content went away. This will produce any number of overlays on top of each other, managing each. Content can optionally appear in a frame with a title bar, closely matching the functionality of showModalDialog.
Download at http://bikehappy.org/modal.html . If used, please give feedback saying if it works and provide update suggestions.